The Daily Novel

My own problems filing online was very similar to those of William Hartston of the Daily Express. Neither of us is stupid. Both of us are used to handling computers. So despite what the Inland Revenue says, there must be many other users who had similar problems.

The amount of time wasted by many people over the few days must have been large enough to make a dent in the national productivity figures.

Let me tell you the practical effects.

This year, because I did not earn much in the tax period, my tax affairs were very simple. It took me about an hour to fill in the form offline. Had I followed my practice in previous years, I would have hopped on my scooter and delivered it by hand to the Euston Road, 15 minutes each way. Total time used one and a half hours. Compared with about two and half days getting to grips with the Inland Revenue site.

The experience has nearly driven me mad. Because the Inland Revenue people I spoke with over the last few days were so certain that it was me that was doing things wrong. They gave me instructions to correct ‘my mistakes’, which I followed. But they did not have any effect.

How do I know now, it was them, not me?

By that tried and trusted method, trial and error.
It took me about a day and half to master all the complicated instructions that William describes so eloquently in his column. It would take far too many words to describe this in detail. The instructions are clear and full. But at several critical points the ting does not work if you follow them. I do not remember how many times I repeated operations just in case I made a mistake. I do not remember how many times I rang the Inland Revenue help lines. I do not remember how many times I turned cleared things off my computer and turned it off and on. But it was not a few times.
By lunchtime, the site told me the job was 95% done, and that I had completed everything without error. All I had to do now was press the Submit button.

Yesterday I submitted more times than in the whole of the rest of my life. The last time just before midnight. And all I got was that hour glass symbol, which I never want to see ever again.

This morning I tried again, after ringing my own tax office to confirm that they would not charge my £100 for being late. This time the hour glass disappeared instantly and I received an error message telling me that I had got my user ID or the password wrong. So I had several attempts to rectify this. Turning off my computer, in between. Just in case I was making a mistake.

No joy. Back on the telephone. This time I was told I must turn off my computer for at least half an hour. Which I did as the cowed submissive person I had become.

But not too cowed to ring the Inland Revenue Press Office and the Daily Express.

After speaking to them I thought I might as well have one more try. So I did the same things once again. And it worked. And I have the online receipt to prove it.

William had the same experience. He said it seemed like ‘a miracle of miracles’.

But since I don’t currently believe in God I think it’s the unseen hands of the human beings who desigin and maintain the Inland Revenue web site.

Incidently first thing this morning I did first time and totally successfully’ pay my £792.24 online tax through my Smile account.

So at least there is nothing wrong with the Inland Revenue method of collecting our money online.

This guest blog comes to you courtesy of the Daily Express.

 BEACHCOMBER 31 JAN

90 years old and STILL

paying his taxes...

THANK YOU for attempting to access the Beachcomber column, but you've caught

me at rather a bad moment. It's January 31, you see, and I've just gone to

do my tax returns and I may be some time.

It's all very well them asking me to subtract the lesser of box b47 and box

c23 from the sum (or difference, as appropriate, see Guidelines p.73

paragraph 5) of box b35 and a37 and enter "zero" if the result is negative,

which it always so I don't see why we went through all that rigmarole

anyway, but do these chaps at Inland Revenue appreciate how many bits of

paper I have to gather from around Beachcomber Towers just to work out what

figure is meant to go into box b47 in the first place?

Right, that's got all the bills and receipts together. Now for a bit of

organising. But first, I think, after all that scrambling I deserve a cup of

tea. I'll just pop to the kitchen and put the kettle on. 

Oh hello! Are you still there? The tea was most refreshing, and so was the

second cup. I'm ready now for some serious form-filling. Where was I? Oh

yes, box b47.

Wait a minute, I need the 2005 third quarter Sundry Ancillary Expenses file

for that box, and it's not here. It must be in the gazebo; I seem to

remember Mrs B using it to transport compost last year. Hang on. I'll go and

get it. 

Sorry to have been so long. It's amazing what you find in a gazebo. Do you

remember that armchair? The one with the broken leg? Well, I've mended it.

All it needed was a long enough nut and a bolt, and I found just the thing

in the Sundry Ancillary Expenses file. Must have dropped it there when I

went to try to mend the chair last Spring. It worked a treat, though I did

take some time finding the pliers. They were back in the West Wing where the

ex-Deputy Sommelier had taken them to tune the harpsichord - or so he said.

Anyway, the chair is now as stable as ever, though I had to repot a few

snails that had decided to make their home among its back netting. 

Right, back to the taxing affairs of the moment. Box b47.  Once I've got past

that, it'll all be plain sailing. Talking of sailing, I'm always reminded of

seafood, and if I'm not very much mistaken, there's a salmon in the fridge

that needs cooking, and all that chair-repairing has made me feel a bit

peckish.  I'll just look up some salmon recipes on the Internet and get back

to the tax in a moment.

Sorry if I've kept you waiting, but that was really delicious. Making one's

own puff pastry takes time, but it's well worth the effort. And that Rick

Stein really knows what he's talking about. I'd never have thought of adding

currants and stem ginger to the salmon, but it worked beautifully and went

so well with the Laurent Perrier Ultra Brut. 

Right. Box b47. I wonder what's on the television? I'll just look at the

guide to see if there's a good film I can look forward to when I've got this

form completed. I fancy I'll be in the mood for something tastefully

violent. Now where did I leave the TV guide? I'll just pop downstairs and

see if it's in the billiards room.

Did you see that shot? I potted the black off three cushions. Junior was

there and challenged me to a game. Well I could hardly disappoint the young

fellow. Oh my goodness, is that the time? I'll never get the tax done by

today's deadline. Still, it's given me a good idea: I think I'll write a

column about displacement activities.  

After spending much of the last two and half days trying to submit my Self Assessment Tax Return online I am somewhat angry. And since I am far from computer illiterate I rang the Inland Revenue press officer to find out what the problem was their end.

There wasn’t one, she told me. They had been doing self assessment for ten years. This year was the best ever and around two and a half million people have filed their returns online, up nearly half a million on last year. Their web site had worked fine, taking 15000 forms online at the peak.

I persisted. How did she know there had been no complaints? Because, she told me, she was immediately informed of customer complaints about self assessment. She did, however, tell me that Beachcomber had done his column on it in today’s Daily Express. So I looked at their web page. It was not there. So off I went to the newsagents. I eventually found the article, which is on Page 48.

The headline was:

90 years old and still tackling taxing problems

So I thought my memory must be at fault again and that H. B. Morton, who wrote the column when Lord Beaverbrook owned the Daily Express, was still alive. Beachcomber did not sound 90 and he told me that Morton had died  in 1975 and that it was the column that was 90 years old.

His experience was even worse than mine, because it started three years ago.

So it is two journalists, who thinks the tax office should pull its socks up, against two and a half million satisfied customers.

You need to know the details if us journos are going to be credible.

So Part Two and Three of this saga will be in the guest blog slot, the crisply written stories which the present Beachcomber, William Hartston, wrote in the Express.

Oh, just in case you’re wondering, the problems had nothing to do with strike by the public service unions. The offices we were dealing with were all manned or (womaned).

Self assessment line took most of the day, with three phone calls. And then it stuck with 95 per cent of the job done. I could have done in an hour or two with a fountain pen and scooted down to Euston Road and back in half an hour.

Sometimes new tech is slow tech.

According to Larry Elliott of The Guardian Gordon Brown is ready to embrace the bloggers of the world. He says Brown, who appeared on the panel with Rupert Murdock, says the days of decision making in smoke filled rooms are over. Politicians had to involve the public and recognise the importance of the internet.

“A few years ago the debate was about whether the media controlled politicians or whether politicians controlled the media.

“Now it is about how we are all responding to the explosive power of citizens, consumers and bloggers.”

I would like to think that the blogging community had ‘explosive power’. But I doubt. I think the big companies, who are well represented at the World Economic Forum, have quite a lot of power over the consumers. And I think the new internet millionaires, including companies like Technorati and Google have a big say in a big say in which blogs get read.

The big companies, including the old media companies, are in a much better position to learn the tricks of meeting the criteria established by the search engines. And they have the money and manpower to attract bigger audiences. The millions of individual bloggers cannot compete in terms of supplying information. They can express their views, opinions and feelings. But how they come to them is still largely dependent on the reports by the mainstream media.

The coolest party was given by Forbes Magazine, which represents old media money. And it is big money. Steve Forbes, the nephew of the man I used to work for, is and he can afford to give away $7 million to political parties.

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, took a swipe at both the mouse and the keyboard, when introducing the new iPhone to the adoring multitude in Los Angeles. ‘Are we going to use a stylus?’, asked Steve, ‘No, we’re not. We’re going to use the best pointing device in our world. We’re born with ten of them: our fingers.’ Now I don’t know about Steve, but I have only eight fingers. And my two thumbs are not only useless on a phone touch screen, they are vastly inferior to my fingers for most tasks on a conventional full-size keyboard.This is not just a quibble. And this article is not just a rant. It is based on my own experiments with many methods of inputting words on to computers, since Fleet Street computerised in 1986. That includes, ball mice, keyboards like the Maltron (which uses the thumbs for numbers and some letters) tablet PCs and voice recognition. And, guess what, I have found that the most efficient tools for the job are the conventional keyboard and the conventional mouse, which is much the same as the one which was standard in 1986.But I also want to be fair to Jobs, who gave us the iPod, which I have found to be far better than its competitors. And I have not yet had a go with the iPhone. (Victor Keegan has tried one. He finds it inferior to two Nokias, but in his article in this morning’s Guardian, he pans it on quite different grounds.) I can speak, however, with experience of using a touch sensitive mobile phone. Which convinced me that my basic position on these matters is valid. The industry’s wish to sell new products, combined with man’s eagerness to buy new gadgets, means that we are going backwards, rather than forwards, in terms of efficient input into computing devices.

I have been so busy generating content for this blog and learning the technology that I have neglected my original purpose. Which was to make the advantages of the Dvorak keyboard better known, so that everyone, and particularly our children and grandchildren, can touch type into their computers, easily, accurately, quickly and with less strain. You can find out how to use Dvorak from my typingbytouch site, which also has a history of typing.

I have also written three blogs on the subject: Time to retire QWERTY, A tale of two tyrannies, and Why don’t you type at 130 words per minute?

Add your comments to the debate below.

Which is what I felt tonight when I tried to close down my computer tonight after a half decent day’s work.

I got repeated messages, not from Spam, which I have leant how to deal with , but from a combined advertising message from three of the biggest and most respectable companies, Toshiba, Compaq and Gateway. I deleted the window but every time I tried to turn off the computer it came back. Writing this after the ninth attempt.

Why are no journalists complaining about this? Which is only one sign of how big companies are taking over the web, while the journalists yap on about the rise of the citizen’s journalism which is still very puny.

I shall have to pull the plug out of the socket. Oh well, at least that will be a contribution to halting climate change.

(You won’t find the answer til you get to the end of this blog)

Just heard from an eighteen year old American student who has reached 94 words per minute using the Dvorak keyboard layout. I first heard from him last July when he found out about Dvorak from the alt-keyboard user group on Yahoo. On 7 July he started the switch from QWERTY and had reached 12 wpm touch typing by the end of his first day. Despite taking a five-week holiday in Switzerland and starting his undergraduate degree, with all the extra work that involved, in late August he has clearly made time to practise more or less every day.

It reminded me of the comment I quoted in my first blog today which quoted Peter Preston, the former editor of The Guardian, asking why long suffering journalism students are required to sit exams twice over, ‘with a pile of shorthand thrown in’. And it reminded me of the article in The Guardian last Friday, when Simon Jenkins revealed that he did not even know there was a better keyboard layout than QWERTY.

Quite a lot of British journalism students (but not any longer those at City University) are forced to learn shorthand to reach the NCTJ target of 100 wpm before they pass, which takes most students at least 200 hours of class and practice at home to learn. If they were caused to spend the same amount of time learning typing from a disk tutorial the best of them could reach speeds of around 130 wpm so long as they learnt the Dvorak layout. Even the average ones would probably reach over 80 wpm without any strain so long as they took it steadily and obeyed the rule of not doing more than between half an hour and an hour each day working with the tutorial.

That would make it totally un-necessary for any more British students to learn shorthand. In many situations they could use their lap tops to input the spoken word. In the pub or at the lunch table they could use the texting shorthand, which, as Simon Jenkins pointed out, is now learnt by most school children. While I doubt they would reach 100 words a minute they could easily do it fast enough to take down the verbatim quotes which journalists need.

I must now reveal that my American friend started learning typing at the age of 7 and had reached 130 words a minute in QWERTY. At the rate he is going I reckon he will reach 150 wpm in Dvorak by Christmas. (He still has to use some QWERTY and his speed in that has fallen to 54 wpm.)

Sceptics will say that he has a totally exceptional talent. My own view is that it is equally likely that he was motivated to learn this not very difficult and rather humble skill. So he went on practising long after he was typing much faster than his class mates or his teachers.

So the answer to the question at the top is:

1. You have never heard of Dvorak

Or 2. You are not sufficiently motivated to learn touch typing.

Or 3. You can’t believe that you too could type at what must seem fantastic speeds.

My other site, typingbytouch, shows you how it can be done and provides a free disk tutorial to download.

Simon Jenkins, in the article referred to above, quoted George Bernard Shaw. Shaw also said something like this:

‘The world has need of men who dream of how things never were. And ask, why not?’

I dream of a world with keyboards engraved with Dvorak available in every school and every computer shop by the time my grandchildren are ready to start. We won’t get there unless a sufficient number of journalists and academics start asking the Why? question. And between them they need to get some decent research going which will prove again, what August Dvorak proved in 1934, that Dvorak can be learnt in one third of the time it takes to learn QWERTY.

Simons Jenkins, in his column in The Guardian today entitled, ‘A million fingers are tapping out a challenge to the tyranny of spelling’, launches a fierce attack on British English, which he says is ‘immured’ in bigotry. He writes: ‘Across the globe, students of English are driven to distraction by its spelling’. He contrasts us with the Americans, who, he says see spelling reform as the sovereignty of common sense. ‘For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.’ As someone who has taught some hundreds of foreign students I stand shoulder to shoulder with him on this issue. European students, particularly take the trouble to learn our language, whereas the British are still extremely reluctant to learn any language but their own.

Paradoxically the only reason the Brits can get away with saying it loud in English in every capital on the globe is because of American power. The world has to learn American, so they can understand English, even in its weird written form. Jenkins argues the case for the British to adopt the American spelling forms. That would not only make it easier for foreign students it would make things less confusing for English children and university students, who have to read, at all ages, many books (and blogs) written in American English.

There is, however, one paragraph, which Simon gets entirely wrong. He compares the British failure to reform its spelling with the failure to reform the QWERTY keyboard layout. He rightly says that the QWERTY layout was designed to minimise the problem on the old-fashioned typewriters of keys jamming when adjacent keys were tapped in rapid succession. His next sentence is quite wrong. He writes: ‘Yet even when the electronic keyboards ended the jamming problem nobody thought to reform the QWERTY layout…’

That is wrong on two counts. The jamming problem was cured long before the electronic keyboard. The QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Scholes in 1876. Improvements in manual typewriter design gradually reduced the jamming problem and it was totally eliminated by the invention of the electric typewriter in the late 1920s.

A much better keyboard layout was invented in 1934 by August Dvorak, Professor of Management at Washington State University after extensive research on word usage in the English language. Dvorak’s layout was specifically designed for touch typing, which was not invented until four years after Scholes invented his layout. The huge advantage of the Dvorak layout is that it can be learnt in one third of the time that it takes to learn QWERTY. It also makes it possible to type 15 per cent faster and about 20 per cent more accurately.

And the amazing thing is that it is available as an alternative layout on nearly all the computers currently being manufactured by two clicks with the mouse. Only a few thousand people know that it is there. The reason it is in Windows is not because Bill Gates wanted to advocate a switch to a more sensible keyboard layout. It is there because, as Microsoft told me when Windows first arrived here in 1995, Dvorak is the only keyboard layout that has variations for people who have only one hand. So if you go into the Windows Control Panel you will find layouts for left handed Dvorak and right handed Dvorak as well as the two handed version. Microsoft told me that they had put in the Dvorak option as part of their policy of developing features which make it easier for people with disabilities to use computers.

As I suggested in my blog, Time to Retire QWERTY, here on 30 August 2006 one further step is necessary if the millions using computers are going to make the change to Dvorak. That is for keyboard manufacturers to produce keyboards which have the QWERTY and the Dvorak letters on each key. The full story about how QWERTY and Dvorak developed is on my other site at www.typingbytouch.com. Where you can also download a typing tutorial to teach yourself Dvorak.

The lesson for Simon, in his efforts to get common sense changes to British spelling, is that even the pragmatic Americans are hugely resistant to change.

Persuading the people in power to make changes in British spelling is going to be even more difficult to achieve than getting them to switch from Dvorak to QWERTY. It is unlikely that either of us will live long enough to see these changes happen. But we can set an example in the hope that our grandchildren will be taught the spelling and the keyboard layout which reason suggests is better.

I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak in the Christmas vacation in 1993 when I was nearly 60 so I know it is not difficult even for someone who has used QWERTY for forty years.

I have decided to lead by example on the spelling issue to. So I am switching to the US language spell check, so this blog will henceforth appear in American spelling. I will let readers know if the change drives me mad.

I hope that Simon will do the same thing. Publish his next book in American English which he can do at his own say-so. But also insisting that his own column on The Guardian appears from henceforth in American English. To do that he will have to persuade The Editor and the Scott Trust and probably have to face the ire of the sub-editors.

But it would be a splendid way of keeping the issue in the limelight. I am sure that not a few Guardian reading teachers of English will be sprinting in their sandals to get in their letters of complaint.

And perhaps we could both suggest to Gordon Brown that the best way for him to show that he is different from New Labour and Old Labour, and that he is in favour of sensible reforms, would be to change the name of the Labour Party to the Labor Party.